Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

From 'Middle East Online'
First Published: 2014-11-30

Investigation uncovers 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ in Iraq
Iraq Prime Minister reveals existence of 50,000 fictitious names in military and promises widening crackdown on corruption.
Middle East Online

Weeding out process will extend to all state institutions

BAGHDAD - Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Sunday announced that an investigation had uncovered the existence of 50,000 "ghost soldiers", and promised a widening crackdown on corruption.

"The prime minister revealed the existence of 50,000 fictitious names" in the military, said a statement from Abadi's office issued after a session of parliament.

A parliament statement said the premier scrapped the 50,000 jobs, equivalent to almost four full army divisions.

"Over the past few weeks, the PM has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem," Abadi's spokesman Rafid Jaboori said.

He said that the investigation started with a thorough headcount during the latest salary payment process.

Soldiers confirmed that salaries were paid only recently after a two-month delay about which they were given no explanation.

"There are two kinds of 'fadhaiyin'," one experienced officer in the security forces said, using a word which, literally translated, means "space men", and refers to the fictitious soldiers crowding the payroll.

"The first kind: each officer is allowed, for example, five guards. He'll keep two, send three home and pocket their salary or an agreed percentage," he said.

"Then the second and bigger group is at the brigade level. A brigade commander usually has 30, 40 or more soldiers who stay at home or don't exist," the officer said.

"The problem is that he too, to keep his job as a brigade commander, has to bribe his own hierarchical superiors with huge amounts of money," he said.

The officer explained that, for those reasons, the thousands of soldiers who defected or were killed this year across Iraq were rarely declared as such.

The United States, which occupied the country for eight years, has spent billions of dollars training and equipping Iraq's military.

Yet the army collapsed when fighters from the Islamic State jihadist group launched a sweeping offensive in June.

Since taking office in September, Abadi has sacked or retired several top military commanders, and Sunday's announcement suggests he wants to tackle the graft and patronage that prevailed under his predecessor Nuri al-Maliki.

"Haidar al-Abadi is setting integrity, efficiency and courage as the criteria to appoint a new military leadership," Jaboori said.

"This weeding out process will extend beyond the military to all state institutions," he said.

2. Conservatives = No fair EU Referendum (they will permit all immigrants and EU Migrants to vote)

who says or more importantly, where says?

===============

4. UKIP = Fair EU Referendum

Since when were UKIP offering a referendum on EU membership?
Why would a UKIP referendum (if there ever would be such a thing) be any more "fair" than the one offered by the Conservatives?

EU citizens resident in Scotland could vote in the Scottish referendum. Of course, EU citizens resident in the UK cannot vote in our general elections. As far as I can see the criteria for voting in an EU referendum would be the same as a GE. In other words, only UK citizens could vote.

Today

The Swiss have voted against limiting immigration. The provisional result is 74% against and 26% for. The view seems to be that they did not want to become isolated from Europe. Immigrants make up 25% of the population.

Only Swiss citizens could vote.

CHAOS!

Forty years of comprehensives have put Tristram Hunt at the top

The Labour north London elite's hypocrisy for attacking private schools is staggering, says Allison Pearson



Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt Photo: PA


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/11255093/Forty-years-of-comprehensives-have-put-Tristram-Hunt-at-the-top.html



By Allison Pearson

9:00PM GMT 26 Nov 2014




The other night, I went to a feast at a Cambridge college. The hall thrummed with the grave rumble of mighty brains and the crystal and silverware sparkled in the candlelight. I asked my learned neighbour how the college was doing raising the number of students from comprehensive schools. His reply was shocking. So desperate was the college to improve its ratio of state-school undergraduates that it had actually started accepting some kids with Bs, and even Cs, at A-level.


These youngsters arrived in Cambridge grossly unprepared and were promptly sent for a year, at the college’s expense, to a local sixth-form crammer where they would be taught to write essays and to generally master all the things that privately educated high-fliers can do by the age of 16.


As a Comp Kid myself, I suppose I should have welcomed the news, but I was angry. Of course, it was very decent of the college to bend over backwards to accommodate applicants who hadn’t made the grade, but why couldn’t bright children from backgrounds like mine count on their secondary school to educate them properly in the first place?


How humiliating that poorer kids were now admitted on “potential”, rather than knowledge and flair. I was staggered that a Cambridge college, which exists to stretch minds of the highest calibre, was paying for teenagers to be taught the basics to compensate for a comprehensive system which has never matched the thorough intellectual grounding offered by grammar schools.


This country, which once educated boys and girls in those grammars to the highest level – far better than many of the fanciest private schools – was now engaged in covert affirmative action, to meet fair-access targets. What other choice was there?


Imagine explaining to a bright spark who won a scholarship to Cambridge from a grammar school in my part of South Wales in the 1950s that, in 2014, it would take noblesse oblige and extra tuition to enable a child like them to make the same leap.

Meanwhile, the admissions process is increasingly weighted against the privately educated kids who actually know stuff, but whose parents have paid their own money for costly tuition. Still, the kids that were spending a “gap year” in a crammer will register in the statistics as state-school applicants thus helping the university look more socially diverse. Huh?

You don’t need a PhD in moral philosophy to work out that something fishy is going on. And what solution does Labour, the party of the underdog, offer? Well, with the UK tumbling down the international league tables in literacy and numeracy, the big new idea of Tristram Hunt, the shadow Education Secretary, is… to attack our private schools. Yup, you know, those simply dreadful institutions with a worldwide reputation for unparalleled excellence?

The same evil schools, that is, where so many prominent Labour supporters send their own offspring to gain the selective advantage their party denies to children from less well-off familes. Baron Hunt of Chesterton, for instance, who was leader of the Labour group on Cambridge council in the early Seventies elected to send his son, little Tristram, to University College School in north London.

How can you possibly preach one kind of education as a Labour councillor then send your own child to an elite, fee-paying school?

Very easily, judging by how few of Labour’s north London elite has actually acted on their principles and enrolled their kids in the nearest state school. Not for them the exciting, multicultural challenge of the notorious Islington Green School, heavens, no! “I mean, we believe in diversity, darling, but Poppy’s got processing difficulties, so she needs to be at Dame Alice Owen’s.”

Dame Alice Owen’s, by the way, is the highly academic school in leafy Hertfordshire where Islington MP, Emily Thornberry, sent her son in 2005. Obviously, Emily, who was sacked from the shadow Cabinet last week after tweeting a photo of a council house in Strood, couldn’t run the risk of her sensitive offspring mixing with Child of White Van Man.

The hypocrisy is staggering. If you have to find something better for your own child then, at least, have the courage to admit that the system is not good enough for any child.

No such admission is permissible, sadly. For Labour took an education system that wasn’t broken and “fixed” it for ideological reasons. The tragedy is that getting rid of grammar schools only served to entrench class privilege. The wealthier went private or bought a house in a good catchmemt area and the poor got what they were given.

You know, I have had it with ideologues, from Anthony Crosland to Tristram Hunt, playing politics with a state education system of which they have zero experience. Would Tristram have become a top TV historian if he’d had to survive one of the shambolic comps a mile down the road from his Hampstead alma mater? I seriously doubt it. Yet this lucky man actually wants fewer kids to enjoy what he had!

There are subtle signs that the tide is turning. Addressing the CBI last week, Ofsted head Sir Michael Wilshaw said that pupils should be directed towards either an academic or vocational school halfway through secondary education. Sir Michael insisted he was not advocating “selection at 14” but “maximum opportunity at 14”.

Hmmm. Sounds remarkably like grammar school by any other name, doesn’t it? And about time, too.

Let me end, as I began, with a Cambridge dinner. On Saturday night, I will be toasting a friend of mine, the Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and joint winner of the million-pound 2014 Brain Prize, given “in recognition of his pioneering research into higher brain mechanisms underpinning literacy, numeracy and and social cognition”.

Fifty years ago, Trevor, who grew up in a terraced house in south London and attended a superb grammar school, won a place to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. No special favours needed. No noblesse oblige. No year in a crammer paid for by his college. Back then, the brilliant working-class boy had an education as good as any of his titled contemporaries, featuring proper hard science and mathematics.

Trevor tells me he doesn’t see kids from his background coming through much any more, though he reckons that nearly all of the best British scientists of his generation came from grammar schools.

Forty years of comprehensive school education and where has it got us? More Tristrams at the top of society and fewer Trevors in store. As an experiment in promoting greater social equality, I’d say it was a C minus.


Wouldn’t you, Tristram?

Heath was a grammer school twit wasn't he Max? -):

I think he was Stan, what of it?


btw, you surely want the best for the kids, not political cant by two faced tossers..no?

Because no won wants a twit, and if you don't want two faces tossers then you are very unlikely to get the best for anyone if you persist with all is right wing nonsense.

PS Any that goes for anyone else.

Watch you on about E/L.. staple diet there for most of the year -)

"Don't do as I do, do as I say!"



Being against the above is right wing nonsense?

The above being all this isolationist, little Englander right wing me me me nonsense that you right wing lot trot out day after day on here.

That article was about lefty hypocrisy Stan, nothing to do with little Englanders.

Do try to keep up.

The above being what has been posted on here for years by you right wing boneheads.

What about the left wing boneheads. Why has every Labour government left the country in bad shape? The normal case is Labour in for one term then out again. Blair only managed longer because he moved the party to the right. Whenever the public are offered a left wing choice they reject it.

Just look what a mess the left wing government in France is making.

Osborne’s NHS boost is unfunded – he doesn’t have the cash 30/11/2014

The BBC’s lead political story today (Sunday) is George 0sborne’s announcement of a £2 billion boost for the English NHS, to get it through the winter crisis period. The Boy, looking much healthier than he did on Wednesday, wanted us to believe the money was available because the economy is strong.


Take a look at the graph (above). Income tax has not increased by even a fraction of a percentage point since he became Chancellor and in fact takings have been lower than in 2008 for much of his period in office.

Corporation tax is lagging well behind its 2008 figure, and in a “strong” economy, this must be because Gideon has cut it in order to help his rich business friends (by which we mean donors to the Conservative Party) get richer.

VAT receipts are up. You’ll remember of course that Mr Zero’s pal David Cameron spent the entire 2010 election campaign promising not to increase the rate of VAT, and almost the first thing he did when he achieved office was – of course – increase the rate of VAT. That is why VAT income has increased.

He doesn’t have the money. He said it was available due to the strength of the economy and economic indicators are instead showing weakness.

According to BBC political correspondent Louise Stewart, the money is – in fact – nothing to do with the strength of the economy. “Of the £2bn, around £1.3bn of it is new money,” she wrote, inaccurately. “The Treasury said it would be found from savings in other government departments.” Not new money, then. “The remaining £700m will come from the existing Department of Health budget and will be put into front line.”

Have you spotted the problem with that? The national deficit is increasing at this time. Government departments are not making savings; they are overspending. They will not have the money to spare. And 0sborne seems to be asking us to count money that is in the existing health budget twice.

This is unfunded spending. Imagine the uproar if a Labour government had announced it!

Here’s an interesting snippet, from the BBC News report: “The Conservatives’ coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, had called for an emergency injection of £1.5bn and a party spokesman said they had ‘fought to make sure that extra funding for the NHS next year is in the Autumn Statement’.” So it seems Mr 0sborne would not have put up any money at all if not for the Liberal Democrats forcing his hand.

Perhaps we should be blaming Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander for making unfunded spending commitment and George 0sborne, David Cameron, Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt for the gross mismanagement that has made it necessary?

Ed Balls has made several sensible points that you can be sure will be ignored by the mainstream media and anyone else who has been taken in by the Tory Nonsense Narrative. The Conservatives have already announced £7 billion in unfunded spending, he said. He warned that VAT could rise again – pointing out that the Tories lied about raising it before the last general election.

“Pretty much everything George has said… falls apart under scrutiny,” he told Andrew Marr.

That has been true since the moment the Coalition was formed in March – yes, March – 2010.

as per above.........The Boy, looking much healthier than he did on Wednesday,

but the next incumbent, whoever that may be, would have the cash?
if not, then they too are making similar unrealisable promises; if yes, then presumably so do the present lot .... not that i'ld believe any of them

Camoron back at Nos 1 trending on twitter.

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